kibot-config: One Push, a Full Fabrication Datapack

Simon Maddison / July 2026 (247 Words, 2 Minutes)

Overview
A board isn’t done when the layout is
The jobs
What it expects from your repo
Why it’s its own repo

Overview

Cimos/kibot-config is a GitHub Action and a small library of KiBot configs that turn a KiCad project into a complete fabrication datapack — drawings, gerbers, BOM, pick-and-place, 3D STEP, Blender renders, panels, visual diffs — on every push.

A board isn’t done when the layout is

Finishing the layout feels like the end. It isn’t. Then you export gerbers, generate the drill files, produce a BOM in whatever format the assembler wants this week, a pick-and-place with the right origin, a STEP for the mechanical team, a render for the pull request, and a panel drawing for the fab. Do that by hand, from menus, every time you change a resistor, and you’ll eventually ship the old gerbers by accident.

The fix is the same one CI applies to software: never generate release artefacts by hand. Let a machine rebuild the whole datapack from source on every push, deterministically, so what you hand to the fab always matches the commit.

The jobs

Each config is a self-contained stage you can run on its own:

build-pcb — schematics, PCB PDFs, gerbers, BOMs, pick-and-place, KiCost data, stencils
build-3d_model — STEP exports, simple and full
build-2d_images — four Blender renders (top/bottom × angled/straight)
build-video — a rotating-board frame sequence
build-diff — KiRi and git-based visual diffs of the PCB and schematic
build-panel — drawings for panelized boards

What it expects from your repo

Almost nothing, on purpose. It auto-detects a single top-level *.kicad_pro, reads an options.yaml for preflight overrides, filters and variants, and an optional panelization.yaml if you’re panelizing. Add a workflow that checks out your project and this repo, then names the config you want:

- uses: Cimos/kibot-config@main
  with:
    config: build-pcb-kibot.yaml

Why it’s its own repo

This started life inside Mad_RP2040 as that board’s pipeline. It was obviously not board-specific — nothing in “export the gerbers” cares which board it is — so I pulled it out so any project could reuse it without copy-pasting a .github folder around. It’s BSD-3-Clause for the same reason: I’d rather people lift these into their own boards without having to think about the licence.

-SM

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